Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [256]
The IRA will not give up their campaign unless they are convinced that there is no possibility of forcing the majority of the people of Northern Ireland against their will into the Republic. That is why our policy must never give the impression that we are trying to lead the Unionists into a united Ireland either against their will or without their knowledge. Moreover, it is not enough to decry individual acts of terrorism but then refuse to endorse the measures required to defeat it. That applies to American Irish who supply Noraid with money to kill British citizens; to Irish politicians who withhold co-operation in clamping down on border security; and to the Labour Party that for years has withheld its support from the Prevention of Terrorism Act which has saved countless lives.
Ian Gow and I had our disagreements, above all about the Anglo-Irish Agreement: but for the right of those whose loyalties are to the United Kingdom to remain its citizens and enjoy its protection I believe, as did Ian, that no price is too high to pay.
In dealing with Northern Ireland, successive governments have studiously refrained from security policies that might alienate the Irish Government and Irish nationalist opinion in Ulster, in the hope of winning their support against the IRA. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was squarely in this tradition. But I discovered the results of this approach to be disappointing. Our concessions alienated the Unionists without gaining the level of security co-operation we had a right to expect. In the light of this experience it is surely time to consider an alternative approach.
* The National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations…the voluntary wing of the Party.
* In this chapter and elsewhere nationalist is generally used as an alternative to ‘Catholic’ and Unionist to ‘Protestant’. While it is true that the political and ethnic division in Northern Ireland is largely (though not always) consistent with and sometimes worsened by religious division, it is misleading to describe it in essentially religious terms. The IRA gunmen who murder and the hunger strikers who committed suicide are not in any proper sense ‘Catholic’ nor are ‘loyalist’ sectarian killers ‘Protestant’. They are not even in any meaningful sense Christians.
* A system of majority rule had existed in the province from the creation of Northern Ireland in the partition of 1920 until 1972, known as ‘Stormont’ (from the location of government buildings on the edge of Belfast).
* See pp. 56–9.
* Convicted criminals sentenced to more than nine months’ imprisonment who claimed political motivation and were acceptable to the paramilitary leaders in the gaols were accorded special category status…allowed to wear their own clothes, exempted from work, and segregated in compounds.
* See pp. 191, 216, 223, 225.
* Prisoners on the mainland received 33 per cent remission: we acted to remove this extraordinary anomaly by reducing remission in Northern Ireland to the same level the following year.
** Internment…detention without trial…had been introduced at the height of the troubles in 1971, and phased out by 1975.
* The Stalker-Sampson Report was the outcome of a police enquiry into a series of fatal incidents in 1982 in which the RUC was alleged to have operated a ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy in dealing with terrorist suspects.
** The ‘Birmingham Six’ were six Irishmen convicted of multiple murders resulting from the IRA bombing of two pubs in Birmingham in 1974. A long campaign was undertaken to prove the convictions unsafe, eventually resulting in their release. At this time, however, their latest appeal had just been rejected by the Court of Appeal.
* In Irish law every person born in Ireland is an Irish citizen from birth, but those born in Northern Ireland do not become